Sue Burickson
“Painting is Silent Poetry”
Plutarch

I’m going to tell you the story of my painting life. I guess you could say that my life as a painter has been dominated by one question. Can my artwork evoke a new impression of inner silence, and tranquility ?

The Qualities of Silence
From Chardin through Morandi Rothko and Bailey, painters have struggled to understand how the elements of tone , color ,composition and scale play in the evocation of silence.

After studying William Bailey’s still life paintings I was led to experiments utilizing his division of space in the canvas and his use of color tones. Interestingly enough, it turned out that his principles didn’t work when painting people. His paintings of people are not silent even though the same palette and similar divisions of space were used.

I studied Rothko’s canvases and was influenced to experiment with the size of the paintings and its impact upon perception. His paintings only work when the whole visual field is filled. They don’t work small because what he wishes to evoke is grand. This led to a study of the relationship between subject and size and medium.

The Role of Color
Like everyone, I first assumed that the function of color was to express feeling. All the literature seemed to support this theory i.e. red with anger, I feel “blue”, green with envy, purple is the royal color etc. Yet, my experience with shades of grey revealed that very subtle emotional states are evoked in the transitions between black and white. In fact, these transitions are much more sensitive and evocative than transitions between primary and secondary colors. This lead to an investigation of color tones,the relationship of colors to one another and the relationship of colors to grey. Then there is the question of the effect of light on color and the composition or relative amounts of color. So there followed a series of paintings entitled Purification of the Feeling. In this series, I study transitions in the color Red as they relate to changes in feeling states during meditation.

The Role of Natural Beauty
On one of those evenings in the forest when one feels that truth, goodness and beauty are one, I was compelled to begin the Tropical Rainforest series. Beauty awakened my soul to act.
Current Work
I am currently working on a series called “The Inner Life of Centaurs” in which I raise the question of the role of the balance between the animal and human natures in Man as they relate to receiving new impressions. This series utilizes a Centaur sculpture with embedded videos.